You know, becoming a pilot allowed to fly the big airliners would be an incredible pain in the ass. The routes seem to be either :
a. Get past highly competitive entrance barriers to air force or naval academy and go to military school for 4 years, then something like 6 or 10 years more service including flight training. Assuming you even made it, most military academy graduates don’t become pilots, and the whole process took over a decade, an airline might pick you up and I would assume that you would *still *start on smaller commercial jets. There are slightly less hard routes where you join as a pilot candidate from a 4 year college but the barriers must be pretty immense, since so many people want to do it that the armed services get to cherry pick the best.
b. Pay an embarrassing amount of money (racked up in student loans) to attend a flight academy/college, and then fly for years to rack up enough hours as a flight instructor or general aviation pilot before you can fly for the airlines. This process takes at least 6-10 years as well. And it involves a lot of time at very little pay, and then even if the airlines finally pick you up, the embraer pilots for commuter airlines are paid as little as 20k. You could have become a truck driver in 3 months and made more than that your first year.
Nobody is going to go through all that just to use the airplane as a missile. There is that outside edge chance that someone passes all those barriers hiding mental illness, or gets tumor or something in their brain after the fact, but the odds are extremely low. I would imagine that if I had made it that far, I’d be focused on trying to enjoy whatever perks are left as one of the pilots of a commercial jet.
What perks are left, by the way? The flight attendants are no longer as attractive as they used to be, I understand the pay isn’t as much any more…what makes being a pilot of a major airliner worthwhile, LSLGuy?
On a side note I was watching a video of the recent military parade through Moscow and I thought there was really nothing at all to stop one of the pilots crashing an aircraft or helicopter into the viewing stand with all the dignitaries present.
I believe Anwar Sadat was assassinated during such a parade, I guess all you can do is have thorough background checks and hope for the best.
Or dropping a mortar shell on them fired indirectly from a mile or more away. Or snipping them from a building. Etc. I think most security of high officials is more geared towards stopping a single nut with a handgun and creating the impression of an impervious defense.
In a thread some time back I read something to the effect, piloting has become sort of like being a musician or athlete – it’s something for which you pay a lot of dues because it gets your heart going and most of those who make a career of it wind up playing weekend gigs or coaching at school, rather than being in the Big Leagues.
It’s harder than we think to organize a proper strike in the middle of the city without someone noticing what you’re doing. Heck, think USA with its umpthy million both legal and illegal firearms plus criminal entities that have access to heavier hardware, and it is still an extraordinary event when some wackjob can actually take a shot at any of the national Big Bosses.
The problem with your hypothesis is that agencies like the Secret Service and the ATF and FBI generally want to trumpet any major success like that to anyone who will listen. Fundamentally, that’s how they continue to exist as an agency - each time they prevent an attack or arrest a wanted criminal, the positive press increases the chance that they continue to be funded. It’s not what they do, it’s what they get credit for in the media.
If homeland security had caught just one airplane bomber at the airport, I guarantee we would have heard about it.
Anyways, nutjobs that actually are in possession of mortar tubes and shells or some kind of missile or have armor piercing rifles and a plan - nobody has tried to take out a president with any of that in years, probably decades. It has always been just random nuts, from guys ramming the front gate to crashing a small plane with no bomb into a house nearby to just firing a few medium caliber rifle rounds in the general direction of the white house and hoping for a miracle. It’s my opinion that most of the security is just theatre, the president isn’t that safe, not really. And everyone else below that gets a lot less secret service protection and is therefore in even greater relative danger. But yeah, the guys in suits can stop a lone nut with a handgun, no problem.
I was going to go through this bit by bit but a general theme became apparent. I think what you are missing is that people who become pilots really want to be pilots. This means that a lot of the shit jobs are actually really good jobs because although the pay may not be much, the work itself is awesome. As the planes get bigger and the awesomeness diminishes, the pay increases and it becomes a means of funding your lifestyle. The US was a bit odd in that the low end airline jobs had you doing airline work (a bit removed from “real” flying) for general aviation wages, or less. That seems to have changed recently by a shortage of pilots and so the regionals are offering signing bonuses and retention bonuses that make the overall package a bit more reasonable.
In short, yes you could go to truck driving school and get paid more than a low end pilot, but then you’d be driving trucks rather than flying a plane.
Depends on where you work. There is staff travel, good pay, lots of leave, you go to work to do a job and once it’s done it’s done, you don’t have to take it home with you. Some people like the sense of taking things or people from one place to another. Where I work, the FAs are still mostly young and attractive (give me old and experienced any day though), the bases are small which means the workload is necessarily low and the employment conditions are good. The view is good and the job is fun.
If you are there because of girls, travel, and uniform then you will find it a great disappointment. If you are there because you like flying and you understand the fun vs pay equation then it can still be rewarding.
Last night there was a Malaysian Airlines A330 departing Melbourne, Australia, that had a rogue passenger try and enter the cockpit with a device that turned out to be a large battery pack. He was overpowered and subdued, but not killed, by the passengers.
The US had a similar event a couple weeks ago. it was such a non-event it didn’t even make the SDMB despite making the newspapers & mainstream TV networks.
As I predicted in an earlier thread, the FAs and a couple pax subdued the guy while most of the pax were oblivious and most of the few who weren’t were busy taking video of the altercation, not assisting in ending it.
@SamuelA: I didn’t want to respond earlier to what’s essentially a hijack (:eek:) of this thread. Richard just above has hit the high points. Most of my coworkers actively discourage their kids from joining the industry.
But when a kid has flying in his/her blood, the parent can see it, can’t change or stop it, and so nurtures the heck out of it. And is very proud when the kid does good and joins the ranks of the pros, even if not (yet) in the major leagues.
This just breeds more paranoia about flying. It’s no wonder that planes are still the target platform for terrorists.
This seems to be a thing with ‘machoism’; I see a lot of men trying to be the hero. Now I don’t know whether the instinct is biological and/or socially conditioned but do you think that a plane full of a team of olypmic athlete women or any women playing professional sports would be quick to jump in a male hijacker as quickly as these men did?
How is it possible to overreact to someone trying to blow up the plane that you’re on? Nobody on the plane knew if/when the bomb would explode or if there was some sort of plan B and what would be required to stop plan B. If they had opened the plane door, impossible I know, and tossed him out I wouldn’t consider that an overreaction.
A person is acting aggressive and irrational, assaulting attendants, making bomb threats and trying to rush the cockpit door… and he’s tackled, hogtied and sat upon? That’s no overreaction. It’s a completely reasonable way to control the situation until the threat can be properly assessed.
No…there was a real danger on board that day. Planes were being flown into buildings across the NE of America.
This is 16 years after 9/11 with much more improved security, reinforced cockpit doors and a guaranteed interception by fighter jets.
We may not be completely less, but I think what passengers are still doing is overreaction at it’s best.
A guaranteed interception by fighter jets only means the passengers will be killed by the Air Force if they aren’t killed by the hijacker(s).
In no sense is an interception good news for anyone on board. Rather the opposite. If indeed bad guys get in the cockpit, no one will survive. Either the bad guys or the “good guys” will see to that.
The crew understands that they are in a fight for their lives. Win or die. There is no third choice. We’d hope enough of the passengers think exactly the same way.
About once every couple of months somewhere in the US a lunatic or somebody having a bad drug experience tries to invade a cockpit. “Security screening” is not effective at detecting those kinds of problems. Neither is intelligence gathering no matter how intrusive.
The security countermeasures on the ground also would not be effective at detecting somebody who wasn’t insane, but was an extremist who intended to grab the airplane but didn’t intend to use an obvious smuggled weapon. Maybe he/she is a martial arts expert and gymnast who intends to do one of those acrobatic jump-kicks we see in action films and leap through the door when it’s opened momentarily.
It’s friggin’ insane that we’ve come to this. But when the public is so cowardly that millions of people will quit flying for months if a few dozen are killed once, we’ve got to prevent that outcome no matter what.
I do wonder if push comes to shove would the authorities actually order a shootdown? We know Bush II did *after *three planes had already struck in two cities. Its not entirely likely that if it happens the authorities would even have knowledge of whether the pilot intends a kamikaze attack or where. That would breed hesitation in pulling the trigger and since the thing happens so rapidly good chance that the fighters serenely escort the plane as it crashes into the target it had selected.
One suspects at that Air Defence’s world over (almost) would prefer to deal with an enemy bomber, at least that aircraft’s intentions are known.